I sat down a couple of days ago and decided to build a Titan Transnational deck. My goal was to create something that embraces the idea of speed to a maximum. I played this deck a lot on OCTGN in the last days (unfortunately I cannot play on real tables, as I am in Turkey until end of September and there is no Netrunner here), and with a lot I mean approximately 50 plays. The overall record is 28:18, which might not seem incredibly great, however you need to consider two things. One is, it appears to have no particular weakness against specific Runners. It is not a deck that loses everytime you play against Kate, or MaxX, or Noise or whoever. Second and more importantly: It is a deck with a potentially high variance. Now if a deck that has a high variance on average already wins 60%, what will happen to it, if you are lucky that day in a tournament? Yup, you have awesome chances of making it to the top.

Concerning variance, please, please read the awesome article about it, written by David Sutcliffe:

And when I say fast, I mean fast. Don’t give the runner time to set up his rig. Play the runner balls to the walls. Force him to make mistakes. Do things like ICE HQ, Hedge Fund, Fast Track Project Atlas if you have Biotic Labor in your starting hand. Don’t hesitate to score Hostile Takeover as your starting move. The Bad Pub is such a minor issue and the economic burst is great.
Don’t be too afraid of an unprotected R&D. There are only few agendas in there and you are Fast Tracking them out, such that the density decreases even further. Do not worry if they steal The Cleaners. Stealing either Hostile Takeover or Project Atlas is ok, too (stealing both is a little problematic, though ). Stealing Government Takeover wins you the game as often as it loses it to you, as you are principally rich and have great chances to have Punitive Counterstrike in hand, and if not, you are likely to have an Atlas token.
I am pretty sure, that for what this deck is supposed to do, the agenda composition is optimal:
You of course want 3x Project Atlas and in order to be able to win when one of them gets stolen, you also want 3x Hostile Takeover. Because those are the only agendas you actually want to score, it makes sense to put in as few additional agendas as possible. Luckily, Weyland can take over the one or other Government. The remaining 6 points are filled by 2x The Cleaners. It could be any 5/3 in theory, but in practice, The Cleaners are the best for two reasons: If the runner steals them, they might get the impression of a nice Scorched Earth deck. So they might run more cautiously or take more time and resources setting up Plascrete Carapace or similar.
The second reason is, that The Cleaners ability actually won me a game - not because of me actually dealing the meat damage, but because of the threat of doing so. Story was:

I was filthy rich and my Noise opponent poor. I had Punitive Counterstrike and Archived Memories in hand. Unluckily, Noise had scored both an Atlas a Takeover before, so either of my two main win-conditions were impossible to reach. So all I could do is IAA The Cleaners. If he scores them, I have great chances of killing him,
if he doesn’t, I am back in the game. He didn’t and in the turn after I scored them, he was still poor, I was still rich so I could install an Atlas in an unprotected Remote, thanks to The Cleaners allowing the double punitive flatline now as well.

So, that’s it for the agenda composition. Next important part of the deck is ICE. Let’s go.

11 ICE seems extremely low for any deck that is not Jinteki:Personal Evoliution. Let me explain you why 11 ICE are enough. Keep in mind that your game plan is to win as fast as possible. All your ICE is supposed to do, is to cheaply stop the Runner in the early game. You have no late game. You do not play a Glacier deck that wants to protect each central server with three to four layers of ICE. You want to force the runner to get out an incomplete rig and hit a Grim because they didn’t have the time to find a sentry breaker. You want the runner to put in a lot of effort and Special Order their Corroder, just to send it to the bottom with Will’o’the Wisp. You are in the drivers seat and all your ICE shall do is buy you a little time in the beginning. That is all you need.
3x Ice Wall is awesome, 2x Meru Mati as well. 2x Wall of Static is better early game against Parasite decks. Quandary stops the runner for one credit and forces him to get another breaker. 2x Grim threats a huge tempo hit if it fires. And it regularly does. You realize I play a lot more barriers than sentries or code gates.
One of the main reasons for this is the abundance of Lady in the Meta. Lady does not like an R&D with three stacked barriers. She really doesn’t.

So that’s it for agendas and ICE, let’s head for assets and upgrades. Former is 3x Jackson. Our Lord and Saviour. Gets rid of Government Takeover when it either wins the runner the game or when you don’t have Punitive in Hand. Helps you draw into Biotic Labor, Hostile Takeover or Punitive Counterstrile. JHow is an All-Star, nothing new.
Upgrades: 3x Cyberdex Virus Suite is absolutely necessary. I mostly use it to kill Clot when Kate summons him. But Cyberdex is also a nice Medium deep-dig protection and it can also kill an Imp when your opponent prepares to snipe Biotic Labor out of your hand. Furthermore, I play 2x Will’o’the Wisp because this card is an awesome tempo hit against Anarchs and Criminals. Anarchs have the hardest time getting back their Corroder from the bottom of the stack. Criminals can still Special Order it back, but you still gain time, particularly because Grim is not as effective against Criminals due to Switchblade or Faerie.

So what is left, is Operations. First, Economy: 3 each of Beanstalk Royalties, Hedge Fund and Restructure. Also 3 each of Fast Track, Biotic Labor and Punitiv Counterstrike. Add one Archived Memory for Biotic Labor and Punitive Counterstrike and two Interns for JHow and Cyberdex or Will’o’the Wisp.

Here we go. That’s the deck. It can be incredibly fast and brutal. I won a fair amount of games by agenda points in less than 10 turns (record is 6). Approximately 15% of all games were won by Punitive Counterstrike. Just as many games were lost because Government Takeover was scored as second agenda.

I am fairly certain that this deck can make it to the top-cut in tournaments regularly. Not only because its variance is higher, but also because it is extremely fast, such that you either have more time to play your runner well or to have an extra ten minutes recovery time between rounds. This can be very important.

I have checked netrunnerDB for similar decks, but found none that was sufficiently similar. So I truly believe that this deck is original and powerful, so if you want to talk about it, name it “1441”.
The one who finds out the reason for that name will get a free beer if I should meet him or her

This might very well be, just as likely as it is that 60% was actually unlucky (considering that 15% of games were lost due to GTO)…
However, 50 games is not as small as you might think. It is 8 tournaments of 6 rounds each. That number of 6 rounds is what you have to compare the 50 to.

This is a fair point. If we assume winning/losing a game is a Poisson process, rough expectation is root(N) for standard deviation, With the data we’ve got, the win-rate is somewhere between 54% and 90%! Obviously it’s probably not Poisson, but I think we need a lot more data to figure out what sort variance and win % this deck really has.

My gut reaction is that this deck, just like all operations-econ Weyland decks except Blue Sun, will fold so hard to Account Siphon it isn’t even funny. The Leela match-up in particular seems unwinnable. Luckily most crims no longer play Same Old Thing.

Account Siphon was not a big deal. I think of all the crim games i played, only one shut me down sufficiently. THey need a full rig to run, and then you have will’o to slow them down again. Meanwhile, you score hostiles and get back on your economic feet. ANd leela is everything but unwinnable. I hope to start with a hostile TO score, so she doesnt trigger the first time. R&D is so light, she will have a hard time finding something there. And to go tag me early against a weyland id that has atlas tokens does not seem to be a smart move when you do not know whether they play scorch or not…

I think the win-rate for this deck against a competent Kate opponent would be about 30% if that. Gain money, keep clot in play. How do you beat that? You don’t have enough ice to hide a cyberdex anywhere that kate can’t get it while keeping clot/clotthreat in play. Am I missing a trick?

Against Kate players, and I guess some competent ones (top 20 SHL 4) this deck is currently 4-3.
It is hard to keep Clot in play all the time. First of all, you need an SMC. I then can install Cyberdex behind an iCE that you lack the breaker for. So you run to trash cyberdex, but that costs you the SMC. so you either need another one or a Clone Chip. I can get cyberdex back easily, but your amount of Clone Chips and SMC is finite. Also not using them means, you do not run as often.
Games against Kate are always very interesting, but far from unbeatable.

Yeah I understand the theory. It’s the same thing NEH has to try to do to play a normal FA game. In practise it just hasn’t played out that way because there isn’t enough ice to guarantee over-taxing the recursion effects in time. Even if you can FA out one agenda that doesn’t help you FA the next one, does it? Against clot Kate are you really fast advancing your full victory or are you winning by flatlines?

I very much like the deck. I’ve been playing a slightly slower version with blacklist and secretary and snare! (only 1 biotic). Also a big fan of enigma over quandry. I was actually planning to tune mine up to something a bit faster like this but with scorch rather than punitive. The potential to win in <7 turns off of an early Atlas is huge and I felt like I had an at least even, if slightly brain bending kate match up. What was difficult for me was actually Leela and Edward Kim, who trashed all my money in RnD, so I’d be interested to know your thoughts on those matchups.

In addition, have you thought about power shutdown to clear fairie, SMC, clone chip etc. I’ve found it pretty good. Helps you pressure their recursion to dodge clot.

Its both. I flatlined one Kate (Government TO for the win), I usually score though.
One time I was ballsy and let her steal the GTO when i had double puitive and sufficient money.
un fortunately she topdecked a hostile after (6 agendas in 37 cards)…

Usually its agenda point victory. I just played against @wakkawakka and his hailey.
Turn 1 saw 2 smc, after that he played all the clone chips. I guess he knows what he was doing,
plus he saw this deck here before. But guess who won

@whirrun I used to play power shutdown. but it only really helps against shaper smc. They have too many
1 cost things so that clone chips survive. I put them out and included punitives, which appears to be absolutely right.

concerning edward: Yes, that is a tougher one. But as an anarch, he is usually slower in setting up his rig, especially considering that he might lose it with Will’o and Grim.
Current record against Kim is 5-3, but 2 of the losses were governemnt TO scored as second agenda

It is a deck with a potentially high variance. Now if a deck that has a high variance on average already wins 60%, what will happen to it, if you are lucky that day in a tournament? Yup, you have awesome chances of making it to the top.

I don’t understand what you mean by this. Can you please explain it further?
Also, how is the weather in Turkey?

What he means is that the deck gives you a good chance of winning irrespective of what your opponent does if you draw the right cards. Therefore if you get lucky, you can win several games in a row, even against good opposition. In a tournament, if you are looking to win, this beats consistently going 3-2 or even 4-1 depending on the tournament size. I would thouroughly reccomend reading the article he cites as that puts it a lot better.

@whirrun explained it very well.
So one excerpt of David Sutcliffe’s article is the comparison between Andromeda and Gabe:
Both might play the very same deck. Now what Andromeda offers, is that you have a solid starting position most of the time, due to her large hand size. What Gabe offers, is that you have an in-game advantage. Now if Gabe draws the very same optimal starting hand (apart from those 4 extra cards), he is in an advantage. When he doesnt, he has a disadvantage.

The rub is that the actual cards coming up is only half the battle. The player’s ability to execute on the cards is ultimately what determines the outcome. With perfect play, yes, the more consistent result is better because the better player will almost always be able to capitalize on his skill advantage. A less skilled player though can “punch above his weight” when the cards swing in his favor, the downside being that when his deck fails, it goes down hard.